Experience Institute's 'Leap Kit' designed to help you finish a project

Photos by Ignacio Espigares and Michelle Consuegra

Victor Saad is founder of Experience Institute. where students and staff helped create "a map, journal and deck of cards that help you design a meaningful 90-day project," according to the company's Kickstarter site.

Victor Saad is founder of Experience Institute. where students and staff helped create "a map, journal and deck of cards that help you design a meaningful 90-day project," according to the company's Kickstarter site.

So you have a big idea, but you’re not sure where to begin. Experience Institute founder Victor Saad hopes his Leap Kit will give you a jump-start — and help get you to the finish line.

Saad in late September launched a Kickstarter campaign for the multitool, which for $50 includes a project map, a field guide and journal, plus coaching cards, all packaged in a sleek folio made from recycled leather. He wants it to help people build their portfolios and hopefully impress future or current employers. With about a week to go, the Leap Kit campaign has more than $34,000 of its $44,000 goal.

The Leap Kit grew out of the small Experience Institute, a $12,000-a-year program through which students design a yearlong curriculum comprising apprenticeships, self-directed projects and other opportunities. Saad said 28 people have attended the Experience Institute since he launched it in 2012.

He said he has gotten interest from individuals who like the idea of experiential learning but who cannot commit to the full-time program.

“How do we just package the very tip of the iceberg to just get people thinking this way, that they can take learning and change into their own hands with a little bit of structure?” Saad said.

The kit aims to support 90-day “Leaps,” which can be any sort of personal or professional project a person envisions. Saad is challenging people to take on such projects in 2016, a leap year. He says on the Kickstarter campaign page that the kit will ship in March.

Experts in the world of design, including individuals at Gravitytank and Stanford University’s d.school, helped develop the Leap Kit, which also includes an online community for users to connect with other “Leapers” around the world.

An online course supplements the materials in the physical Leap Kit with videos and curated articles. Saad said 320 people, mostly friends and past students, already are undertaking the three-month Leaps.

After the Kickstarter campaign ends, Experience Institute will continue to make the supplemental online course available, but will stop bundling it with the Leap Kit, Saad said. Though the online course and kit represent additional revenue streams for Experience Institute, Saad said, “We want to spread an idea more than we want to scale a company.”

Saad said he’s talking with companies and colleges that want to have their employees and students do Leaps.

“Before, design was just for graphics, print materials,” Saad said. “Now it’s everything from an event experience you design to, obviously, products and spaces and everything in between.”

He said design can also be applied to learning, and that he hopes to supplement existing undergraduate and graduate school models.

Liz Gerber, an associate professor of design at Northwestern University, likened the Leap Kit to a self-help book, in that it helps individuals identify the steps they need to take to attain a goal. She commended the inclusion of a community network to support Leapers as they work on their projects.

But Gerber also noted the Leap Kit’s project map, the Leap Map, follows a trend that the Business Model Canvas, a visual guide, introduced in 2008. She said such tools suggest that a self-help book on its own is not enough.

“What they’ve done here is taken this big, audacious goal that you might have and break it down into small steps in a visually compelling way,” she said, referring to such tools. “Years ago people wouldn’t have said there needed to be a visually compelling way to do this.”

Such maps aim to emphasize those small steps, which people find more manageable as they embark on big goals, she said.

That’s what Saad hopes. He touts the Leap Kit as a tool that “gives you the tools to think about every portion of life with more intentionality and thought.”